SyncO365

SyncO365 was build in partnership with large school boards and Universities to solve the problem of automatically provisioning SharePoint and Yammer sites for each of their classrooms. These academic institutions needed a place for students to easily author, share and store content in a way that was both private to the student and teacher or shared with the classroom. SyncO365 is not a Learning Management System (LMS), rather it augments LMS's by providing a friction free environment for students to work.

The 'engine' runs as a service so that the changes in the SIS are reflected in the SharePoint environment after SyncO365 executes. Leveraging classic Business Intelligence (BI) constructs, SyncO365 contains a DataMart that allows the data to be extended to other source systems, augmenting the data not resident in the SIS. The DataMart also serves as an audit for the integrity of both systems. Data issues with the SIS are often identified through this DataMart.

SyncO365 contains the following key components:

Data Harvester –collects all of the student, faculty and course information from the Student Information System (SIS)

Data Transformation –the data collected from the harvester is converted into a format that can be used to generate and maintain Office365 SharePoint artifacts.

Provisioning Engine –the data that is collected is used to provision SharePoint artifacts. Though there are many options, typically this means the tool will generate:

A Site Collection Per School (or Faculty) plus One Site per classroom

A Document Library containing one folder per student with unique permissions for that teaching team and student.

Other artifacts like a place for the teaching team to store documents to share with the classroom, a class calendar, and so forth.

After the initial load, SyncO365 monitors changes in the SIS and updates the SharePoint Sites accordingly. Typically this process is scheduled nightly but can be executed more frequently.